Pages

Monday, April 20, 2009

Tapestry of Grace

I have been homeschooling a long time. While I have heard of Tapestry of GraceTapestry of Grace, I have never looked at it thouroughly. So, when the opportunity to review a unit of Tapestry of Grace came up, I was thrilled. As part of the TOS Homeschool Crew, we were given the choice of 1 unit from any of the years available from TOG.

Now let's talk a little bit about what exactly is Tapestry of Grace. "Tapestry of Grace, home of the award-winning multi-level, integrated, 4-year, classics-based Christian curriculum for the whole family." The way that TOG does this, is by offering 4-years of curriculum, that you will then use with your children for their entire school career. How, you ask? I am so glad that you asked!

They use a literature based; classical approach, you will teach all of your children, using a single curriculum, however activities and instruction will be tailored to each child at their own level. The levels follow the "Trivium"; Lower Grammar , K-3, Upper Grammar 3-5, Dialectic, 6-9 and Rhetoric, 10-12.

We are not a classical ed family, so all of that lingo is new to me. However, we are familiar with working together as a family on subject matter, and then tailoring the output to fit the development of the individual child, and that is what this is.

What do you get when you purchase TOG? Well, you have a couple of options, you have the Digital Edition (DE) or you have the Printed Edition. When you purchase the digital edition, you will recieve everything electronically. Basically VERY LARGE E-books. It is the same curriculum as the printed, except that it is on your computer.

Whether you choose the DE or the Printed Edition, what you recieve, is a very detailed, outline, and guide for teaching. It has, discussion questions, activities, information about the time period that is being studied, however, none of the books are included. To me this is a real turn off. While I understand, that it would be almost impossible to supply all the books for all the different levels, however, with our busy homeschool life, it was much too much work to find the specific books that were required. However, if you have a great library system, and you are a pro and inter-library loans, then this would not be an issue for you.

I will tell you, that everything in the program is laid out beautifully. And if this is the method of homeschooling that you use, or have been interested in, then you may very well love this program.

A real plus to this curriculum, is it's biblical world view. And for that I am very grateful and pleased to see. I believe they tie in bible principles with history very well.

This curriculum clearly is not for our family, however, I believe that it is of high quality, and if you are educating your children using the classical approach you would be very pleased with this program.